I recently attended a public event organised by Art Not Evidence which campaigns against the criminalisation of drill music and the use of rap lyrics in justice proceedings. I am not a fan of the genre — which originated in Chicago before being given a dark British twist. I couldn’t name a track by 67 or Moscow17, let alone defend the groups’ aesthetic choices. What little I understood of the musical genre’s link to South London’s gang culture came from the pronouncements of politicians and law enforcement, or the periodical media frenzy such as accompanied, for example, rapper Digga D’s arrest streamed live on Instagram.

Drill is firmly associated in the public’s eye with violent gang activity. Not without some good cause. Knife crime plagues parts of London. Even accounting for policing bias, the correlation between violence by young black men and the often unambiguous threats and boasts in drill lyrics is difficult to ignore. Some representatives of the affected communities present at Art Not Evidence’s event were more interested in “accountability” for perpetrators than in justice reform and the artistic freedoms of rappers.

The challenge for Art Not Evidence is thus profound. Attending their event, I wanted to understand how the activists might make their case against such odds. I arrived sympathetic to some of their aims because I am active in another campaign that tries to protect artistic expression in the art world. I expected to share some of Art Not Evidence’s principles, though not necessarily their taste in music. I was very wrong. Before I left, the campaigners forcefully rejected my argument for protecting artistic freedom as a good in itself and branded me a racist.

Attempts to stop the allegedly corrupting influence of gangsta rap are as old as the music form itself. Detailed descriptions of gang violence in the lyrics of artists like Tupac Shakur or Ice-T sparked a moral panic and legal crackdowns in the US in the 1990s. Prosecutors unsuccessfully attempted to use Snoop Dogg’s lyrics to prove his alleged propensity for violence in a murder case. The artist claimed to tone down his later output upon reflection, to the discontent of his fans.

In the UK, drill musicians lack the name recognition that brings great media attention to police proceedings. However, Rap on Trial, a research project at the University of Manchester, identified some seventy recent criminal cases in which the prosecution in part relied on evidence derived from recordings of drill songs. By 2018, the Metropolitan Police had built a database of 1,400 videos and begun training a “Drill Music Translation Cadre”. These officers serve as expert witnesses in court, interpreting the often slang-filled lyrics for juries not familiar with the meaning of “cheffing” (stabbing) or “bootings” (shootings).

The history of law enforcement is peppered with attempts to criminalise fiction that became laughable only after they were overturned and after social mores had changed. Art Not Evidence is understandably concerned that the misuse of drill lyrics can contribute to such miscarriages of justice. The Met’s work amounts to the state scrutinising an individual’s artistic output lest its analysis becomes useful in making a moral or evidential case against them later. If the alleged perpetrators weren’t young black men and their music wasn’t so unpopular outside of South London, such policing might have met with a public outcry. 

Yet Art Not Evidence, a campaign spearheaded by a music industry executive, suggests that the convictions of drill musicians are entirely the outcome of the systemic racism of the criminal justice system rather than anyone’s criminal activity. The event’s panel failed to acknowledge that — gasp — many drill musicians are indeed involved in gang violence. (A lot of the most successful artists are currently in prison.) One of the panellists boasted of being involved with Art Against Knives, an organisation helping young people avoid perpetuating violent crime. He didn’t explain, however, why drill isn’t one of the art activities this charity promotes as the safe path. Even the friendly audience in the room wasn’t having it. It’s no use blaming white racism for violence perpetuated this close to home.

In truth, the status of drill as admissible and reliable evidence is a subject of a complex and intense legal debate which does not solely rely on the antiracist stance of campaigners. What does determine the outcomes, however? The law, in principle, is capable of nuance. One might like to imagine that it knows when an artwork becomes an artefact relevant to strictly defined categories. The questions get murkier when it comes to the grounds for exempting artistic expression from certain forms of evidentiary scrutiny. When is a nasty line in a song sarcastic or merely hyperbolic? What should the court do with an explicit admission of guilt set to a trap beat which the jurors don’t think makes for good art?

The principles through which we approach these questions have implications far beyond drill. A parallel which Art Not Evidence is unlikely to appreciate lies in the ongoing clamp-down by the police and courts on social media activity by individuals rhetorically connected with the riots that shook England this month. What credence should the law pay to exaggeration, outright falsehood, or keyboard warrior bravado as forms of speech? Does the criminality of a speech act lie in its content, syntax, or its provable real-life effects?

The Government’s “Think before you post” campaign warning social media users against sharing riot videos suggests that the state has not thought about this and would rather base its response on the aesthetic feel of the speech than its content. The fallback position is to criminalise or render taboo certain modes of expression preemptively. 

Drill musicians have been familiar with this trick for years. In 2019, the rappers Skengdo and AM were handed nine-month suspended sentences for posting, in the words of the Metropolitan Police, “drill music that incited and encouraged violence against rival gang members” on social media in breach of an earlier injunction. Digga D is obliged by a Criminal Behaviour Order to submit all his music for approval by the force. Lawyers speaking at Art Not Evidence’s event cited Orders that criminalise the use of particular words or instruments in drill music and suggested that DJs could land artists in jail by merely remixing their songs.

Is such deployment of a legal instrument that criminalises the exercise of rights commonly believed to be universally guaranteed defensible? The British state believes so, and it might in time become less selective about the kinds of speech-related offences that Criminal Behaviour Orders are invoked to prevent. At the Art Not Evidence event, members of the audience critiqued the practice by painting artistic expression as a human right. This tactic, however, fell flat on the panel. This campaign was a “black” issue, not a universal one, and therefore required the establishment of a separate category of black rights. It was as if the abstract fight against racist oppression was more important than the campaign’s explicit goal. 

When a white criminologist proudly proclaimed the event antiracist, I understood that despite my instinctive support for aspects of the cause, I could not share an understanding of the issue with the campaign. This is because, not being an antiracist, I see no rational way by which a principled, universal doctrine of protection for artistic expression could emerge from the imperative of challenging racism. No form of argument I find convincing leads from “the police are racist” to “artists must be free to make violent art”. 

By basing their argument on race, Art Not Evidence can only ever demand a special exemption for drill that would counterbalance the racism of the criminal justice system. It is ironically unfortunate for the campaign that their unsustainable approach has plenty of supporters. Are they all antiracists or genuine drill fans who believe their heroes are all innocent? When I raised this point of principle in informal discussion, I was told that the opinions and support of “white men” were not welcome. For a spiteful moment, I wondered if drill was worth protecting at all under my own doctrine of free speech.

British society lacks a shared understanding of the principles that guide and protect free speech and artistic expression

I might not mind too much either way. But similar limitations stymie other campaigns for free speech and free artistic expression. The contemporary art world, for example, has been rocked by multiple accusations of censorship and retaliation experienced by supporters of both sides in the Israel-Hamas war. Nearly without fail, the arguments wheeled out amount to “I need free expression to suppress the speech of my opponents”. Thus, there’s a free speech argument for Zionists, and a conflicting one for defenders of Palestine. Given that artistic freedom is the art world’s intellectual bread and butter, the poverty of these campaigns is staggering.

British society lacks a shared understanding of the principles that guide and protect free speech and artistic expression. But should we all follow the legal contingencies of Article 10 of the European Charter of Human Rights? I’m not even bemoaning that nobody reads On Liberty anymore. Rather, I wonder why those who should have instead decided to promote partisan and self-serving arguments for the strategic restriction of free speech. Flicking through Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introduction pamphlet on Free Speech authored by the populariser of philosophy Nigel Warburton, for example, one might be forgiven for thinking that the key challenge of free speech is constantly having to find new ways to curtail it. This has disastrously played right into the state’s hand.

The danger of building arguments, campaigns, and social sentiments on poorly articulated principles and in the absence of comprehensive legal protection is that they occasion hollow victories easily overturned when the favoured paradigm changes. Art Not Evidence is unlikely to change its stance. My view that drill musicians should not be prevented by the state from making terrible, or even extremely violent music is unchanged despite my dislike of the campaign’s argument. And while I see that court juries are unlikely to read drill lyrics with adequate care, I am reminded of the use of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial. The novel’s legal abuse was abominable. It did, however, lead the court to correctly deduce that its writer was, indeed, a homosexual.